by Julia Bell
‘Suit yourself.’ He doesn’t look at me as he pulls on his driving gloves. He opens his mouth like he’s going to say something else, but then Mum comes out of the kitchen and clings on to him.
I hear the car revving while I wait for the toaster, and then Mum, quietly closing the front door. The house always seems empty after he’s gone. I shiver, and pull my cardigan tighter round myself.
After breakfast, I wander into the lane and search the hedge for clues – broken stems, crushed leaves, footprints in the mud. I find a little hollowed-out space in the hedgerow just past the beech tree. This is an old, gnarled tree with antique graffiti on it. Carved into the bark right at the bottom it says Tray and Keren ’77. The branches have grown weird and twisted so it’s easy to climb into them. When I was younger I used to climb up really high, leaping from branch to branch, right up into the canopy where the branches start to get thin and twiggy, and pretend I was a cat, or a bird. Thinking about this makes me squirm. Living here has made me really lame.
A bit further up, there’s a foxhole in the hedge that you can squeeze through into the fields; here there’s a thread of blue denim caught on the brambles. I climb through and follow the trampled grass round the edge of the field. And then I see her, knees drawn up to her chin, sitting in the long grass.
She doesn’t look up, even when I get closer.
‘Hello.’
She doesn’t reply. But I can see that she’s shivering, denim jacket pulled tight round her. Her hair clings in dirty straggles to her neck and she looks younger than she did on the ferry.
‘Are you all right?’
I put my hand on her shoulder and she jumps like I’ve hit her. But she doesn’t say anything, chewing at the skin around her fingernails.
‘Um, sorry.’ I don’t know what to do then and stand there looking at her, arms flapping uselessly against my sides. ‘I’m not going to tell anyone.’
She stands up, shaking herself like a wet dog, hair flying. ‘You have food?’
‘Well no, not on me, I mean, yes. At home.’ I don’t know why, but talking to her makes me feel nervous.
‘I want go to London.’ She says this like it’s somehow my fault she’s still here.
‘Well you’ll have to get a bus to Norwich and then a train.’
‘Nor-itch?’
‘It’s about twenty miles.’ I turn round and point through the hedge. ‘That way.’
Her skin is grey and she’s got panda eyes. She’s rubbing her arms and stamping her feet, even though now the sun has burned through the haze it’s starting to get quite hot.
‘Do you want a jumper?’
‘What is a jumper?’ she asks, and then she laughs a rough sharp sound and starts jumping up and down. ‘I am a jumper!’
I laugh, but not because it’s funny. I think she’s really weird.
I fiddle with the cigarette packet in my pocket. I’ve only got one left and it’ll take me ages to get some more. But her eyes light up when I pull the packet out of my pocket.
‘D’you want to share?’
I spark the cigarette and take a short puff, passing it to her. She smokes it quickly, pulling the fire through the tobacco all the way down to the filter without passing it back.
‘That was my last one,’ I say as she flips the butt into the field. ‘Don’t do that! You could set fire to the field!’ I crash down the bank, following the trajectory into the edge of the crops. The grass is already smouldering. I stamp at it with my foot. I tell her that this time of year, when the crops are really dry, it’s easy to burn them. Especially closer to the main road. One year the farmer lost two fields to a cigarette butt.
‘You can’t put it out,’ she says. I spin round, expecting to see that the fire has already caught the crops. ‘It’s spreading.’
‘No it’s not.’ I trample the grass some more just in case.
‘All over the whole world.’
When I look at her, she’s staring at the sky.
I’m annoyed now. She’s weird, and I don’t trust her.
‘I’m going home.’
She shrugs. ‘Yes.’
But when I turn my back on her and start scrambling up the bank she follows me.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Coming with you.’ She smiles at me, which makes her whole face softer, more open.
‘Make up your mind.’
Instantly, the smile drops and her expression changes back into a blank scowl. ‘I go to London.’
‘OK.’ I scramble through the gap in the hedge and jump down on to the road. ‘It’s that way.’ I point up the lane and hurry away from her. Maybe I should call the police.
‘Where is Totten-Ham?’ She runs after me and grabs my arm. ‘You know? Where is Totten-Ham? Please?’
She sounds desperate again, like she did in the van. I don’t know why, but I feel angry with her, like I want to fight her, and in the back of my head all I can hear is Mr Crawley going on about how illegal immigrants are all criminals and terrorists. ‘Look. Just calm down, all right?’
As I raise my voice, her shoulders slump. ‘Natasha is sorry,’ she says, looking at her feet. Then she grabs my hand with both of hers. Squeezing, so I can feel the bones in her fingers. ‘Help me, please to find Totten-ham.’
I shake her off, but her hands are so cold and she just looks so desperate. I tell her that there are maps back at the house, but that she’ll have to wait until Mum’s gone out shopping. I tell her to stay hidden in the hedge, just for a while, and that I’ll come back and get her when the coast is clear.
‘Coast is clear? But we are not by the sea.’
I stare at her. ‘Um, yeah, I know. It’s kind of an expression.’
‘Expression?’
‘Yeah. Don’t worry about it. I’ll come back in a while.’
‘OK.’ She smiles at me again. ‘You are friends to Natasha?’
And she scurries back through the hole in the hedge.
Mum is in the garden, deadheading the flowers, clipping back the greenery. Shaping the plants so they grow the right way. She’s got her floppy sun-hat on, a big white crocheted one that she bought for a wedding in the seventies.
‘Hello, child,’ she says as I sidle up to her.
‘Mu-um?’
‘Yes, dear?’
‘We haven’t got any food.’
‘Don’t be silly, there’s lots of food. Just defrost something from the freezer.’ Mum always keeps leftovers in plastic bags in the freezer. Small dollops of Bolognese, or curry or soup, but they go funny after being in the freezer and taste like sick. I tell her this, but she just gives me one of her looks.
‘I’ll go to the shops when I am good and ready. It’s not like you’re starving, is it? I’ve offered you some food, it’s not my fault if you don’t like it.’
‘Well it’s not my fault that I’ve got bad parents,’ I throw back at her, suddenly cross.
Mum is really paranoid about being a bad parent. She thinks, because she had me so late, that she wasn’t really ‘one of life’s natural mothers’. Maybe that’s why she treats me like a cross between her granddaughter and an irritating fly.
About ten minutes later she comes back inside the house, dumping a basket of lavender on the kitchen table. She changes out of her gardening shoes and winds the car keys round her finger. I’m making a big deal of ignoring her, cuddled up to the Aga, pretending to read.
‘You ready then?’ she says eventually.
‘I’m not coming.’
‘I thought you said you were hungry.’
‘I’m reading my book.’
She sighs and taps her foot. ‘You know, when they told me that the teenage years were the worst part of being a parent, I didn’t believe them. Silly me. I don’t understand why everything with you has to be an argument. Can’t we just get along like a normal family?’
This makes me snort. A normal family? ‘Normal families don’t live in the middle of nowhere.’
Sh
e gives me one of her looks. A you’re-not-really-my-daughter kind of look.
‘You don’t know how lucky you are, young lady.’ She pinches my ear nearly hard enough to hurt.
‘Child abuser,’ I say, swatting her hand away.
When she’s gone I take Natasha round the back, through the conservatory, which is like a mini jungle of pot-plants and orchids. She doesn’t say anything as we go through into the kitchen, but she touches everything with her fingers. Gently running them over the units, the dishes piled up on the sideboard, the kettle, the toaster.
‘You have much moneys,’ she says quietly.
‘Not really. I mean, Mum and Dad have lived here since I was born. I mean, they hardly paid anything for the house when they bought it.’
She looks blank, like she doesn’t understand what I’m saying. I get some cheese and biscuits and put them on a plate.
‘Where are you from?’
She shovels in cheese and crackers, spraying crumbs all over the floor.
‘Ngh,’ she says with her mouth full. She swallows and starts coughing. ‘I have to go to Totten-ham. Show me where is Totten-ham.’
‘OK. OK.’ I rummage through the bookshelf on the dresser where Mum keeps all the maps and bills and cookbooks. ‘Is that where you’re getting married then? Tottenham?’
‘Married?’ She looks puzzled for a second, then her face changes and she starts laughing. ‘I don’t get married.’
‘But you said—’
‘That was yesterday.’ She shakes her head. ‘And now it is today! Now is another story!’ She smiles, quick, sharp; not like the kind of smile you give people when you’re happy. She looks away from me at her hand, and pauses over a gold ring on her wedding finger. She pulls it off and gives it to me. ‘Here. To pay.’ She points at the empty plate.
‘Oh, no!’ I push her hand away but she puts the ring on the table and shrugs.
It’s then that I notice she’s got dirt on her face and her thin, skin-tight trousers are covered in muddy marks from the fields and she kind of smells; and then I realize, although I’ve noticed it before I never really thought about it till now, that she’s got no stuff. No bag or anything, or any clean clothes.
But before I can ask her more questions there’s the crunch of gravel in the drive and the sound of an engine running. I peek out of the window to see the car parked nearly in a flowerbed and Mum getting out of the driver’s seat. She’s calling my name.
‘Quick!’ I grab Natasha’s hand. ‘Hide!’
We sprint upstairs and into my bedroom. ‘Stay in here. I’ll get rid of her. She’s probably just forgotten her purse or something.’
‘Hope! Hope! Darling?! Are you there?’ She sounds out of breath.
I’m back downstairs and into the kitchen just in time. ‘Why didn’t you answer me the first time?’ She’s got her hand pressed over her chest like a lady in an old-fashioned painting.
‘I was reading.’ I hold out the book, and realize I’ve been pretending to read it upside down. But she doesn’t notice.
‘Don’t do that to me. I didn’t know what – I thought –’ She catches her breath.
‘Did you forget your purse?’
‘No. I forgot you. You’re coming with me. Now.’ Her face is pale, shocked.
‘Why? Where are we going? What’s happened?’ My chest tightens; she sounds scared and serious.
‘I’ll tell you in the car.’
‘But—’
‘No buts.’
Before we leave she checks that all the doors and windows in the kitchen are locked. ‘You haven’t seen anybody around the place this morning have you?’
‘No!’ My face freezes – how does she know?
She bolts the door into the conservatory, grabs my arm and hustles me out of the house. She double-locks the front door behind us, pauses on the front step and looks out over the fields. The morning swallows are already high above us, cutting through the air, making sharp razor calls.
‘Can you see anything?’
‘What am I supposed to be looking for?’ The fields, sewn together by thick hedges and lines of poplar trees, all look the same as usual to me.
‘Anything out of the ordinary.’
She never locks up like this unless we’re going on holiday. Sometimes she even leaves everything completely unlocked when we go shopping.
As I get in the car she tells me that she’s sorry, but it’s not safe to leave me on my own. ‘Not today.’ The tyres screech as she wrenches the gears and the car bounces out of the drive into the lane, narrowly missing the gatepost. I look up at the house and I’m sure I can see movement, a flutter of the curtain in the front bedroom, the shadow of a person behind the glass.
‘There’s been a break-in, at the farm. Only they didn’t take anything. Just turned the place upside down.’ Like they were looking for something apparently. Yesterday night, while the family was all in the pub, just after we got back.
My fingers tingle with relief. She doesn’t know about Natasha. It’s just a stupid burglary.
‘Probably kids,’ Mum says, ‘but I don’t want to risk leaving you on your own.’ She says there have been a few sightings since, a strange car parked in the lane, a man in a leather jacket seen running across the fields.
My heart starts beating fast and loud. Natasha’s boyfriend had a leather jacket.
‘Mum—’ I met this girl . . . The words form on my lips but I don’t say them. What if all this has nothing to do with Natasha? And anyway, I don’t know why, but I can’t tell Mum about her, not yet. What I do know is that since yesterday, when we got off the ferry, the air has had a weird, exciting fizz about it, a crackle of static like the electricity in the air before a storm.
5
Oksana
The English girl has more clothes than I have seen, even in the shops. When I open the wardrobe door some of them tumble out all over the floor. Rolled up tops and jeans, skirts and dresses, jackets that have lost their hangers.
I don’t know where she’s gone. Her mother came to get her and her voice was sharp and scared. My heart is really beating now. He’s here. I know he is. I can smell him, the greasy hair, the sweat, the Hugo Boss aftershave that makes him think he’s a player. But maybe I’m just being paranoid.
I have to get away from here, and quick. I need money and clothes. I can’t stop to think again. I’ll get stuck, staring at the fields and the birds, not wanting to move. The English girl already thinks I’m crazy, I can tell. I grab a pair of jeans and a few T-shirts. They look expensive and new. When I’ve found Adik, I’ll send her some money. I’m not a thief.
I grab a green bag with a red badge on it, Manhattan Portage. I try to stop my hands from trembling as I stuff it with clothes. I need money. Enough for a train fare at least. But I don’t know how much English pounds are worth. In Italy they always paid in euros. So much cleaner than roubles, the notes were always new. Not worn and dirty like at home, where everyone worries the notes in their hands, wishing they would grow into more or change by magic into dollars.
Not that I ever kept any of it. Zergei, and before him Antonio, always took it away from me straight afterwards – before I could count it.
Where do English people keep their money? I lift up the mattress but there’s nothing there but an old sock. I look around her room; all over the surfaces there is stuff. Jewellery, make-up – I put a lipstick in my bag – on the walls there are posters of models and films stars. I open a drawer and find some coins, a few that say one pound, which I know is worth more than the brown pennies. Five pounds. I don’t know if that’s enough. Somehow I don’t think so. Zergei grumbled to me once that it was expensive to live in London.
The house is so big I don’t know where to start. There are two more bedrooms on this floor, one of them empty, just a blue bedspread over the huge bed and expensive looking lamps. Everything smells rich: clean and new. I know I could sell this stuff back home, Tetya Svetlana would be falling over herself t
o get these bedspreads, the curtains, the lamps. There’s more quality in this empty room than Zergei could ever dream of.
He was getting crazy on the ferry. The drugs, maybe the stress, I don’t care. He said he would throw me off the boat if I screamed, and held me round the throat so I couldn’t breathe. For a second I thought he would kill me, right there on the back of the boat with all the people smoking their cigarettes. Although, I am much smaller than him and he was hiding me with his body. Anyone who looked might have thought he was kissing me.
‘You let her go!’ he said, his eyes popping. ‘I told you the plan!’
I was supposed to make friends with the English girl and take her to look at the car or something stupid like that. Then he was going to push her into the car and take her off the ferry and through customs using Marie’s passport.
‘She doesn’t even look like Marie!’ I said. ‘She’ll shout!’
He didn’t like me pointing out flaws in his plan. ‘Shut up and do it!’
But when it came to the moment she was so stupid and sweet and innocent I couldn’t. Even with Zergei standing behind her. I knew he wouldn’t do anything himself. It was too risky. He couldn’t just kidnap someone in plain daylight. People would see.
When they made the call to get back to the cars and he was still queuing for cigarettes, I ran. My heart beating so fast I thought I might pass out or fall over. My legs seemed like they weren’t there, like they were made of feathers, or air.
‘Hey!’ And I heard him shouting my name down the stairwell. ‘Hey!’
I had seconds; all the families were coming back to their cars. I had to find somewhere good, somewhere no one would ever look. I heard a story once about a boy who came to Italy by holding on to the underside of a lorry all the way from Vienna, but I was on the wrong deck for lorries, I was with the family cars and caravans.
